By the time, Return of the Living Dead III hit theaters in the Fall of 1993, the zombie genre was for lack of a better word – dead. No one was really making movies about people who came back to life and ate human flesh or brains at this time. It didn’t help that the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead bombed badly with bad reviews and box office receipts. No, horror was a word that didn’t need to be spoken.
The Silence of the Lambs had become the first horror movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars, but they were calling it a “psychological thriller.” Call it whatever you want to, but it’s about a man who cuts the skin off heavyset women to make a woman suit and another man who kills because he likes the tastes of human flesh. That’s horror, anyway you slice it.
So, this third entry into the Return of the Living Dead movie came and went with little fanfare. At least the second movie, which was horribly reviewed and dumped into theaters in January of 1988, was able to bring in over $9 million against a $6 million budget. This one had a small budget at $2 million from Trimark Pictures, an independent production studio that was trying to make a name during the “Independent Movie Renaissance” of the late 1980s and 1990s.
Directed by Brian Yuzna (of Society and Bride of Re-Animator fame), the plot does away with the comedic elements of the previous two movies for a more serious Romeo and Juliet-type take. Whereas the first movie had 1980s punk rockers, this one features 1990s Gen X teen angst in Curt Reynolds (J. Trevor Edmond) and Julie Walker (Melinda Clarke credited as Mindy Clarke). Set in southern California, they are two young kids in love.
However, Curt is an Army brat and his father, Col. John Reynolds (Kent McCord), is overseeing a top-secret program to test the 2-4-5 Trioxin gas from the previous movies on reanimated corpses that could possibly be used in combat. Curt and Julie sneak into the base as well as the research facility where they observe one of the corpses become violent and attack scientist.
Unable to safely subdue the corpses with a projectile that fires a chemical in their brain temporary freezes and immobilizes them, Reynolds discovers he’s been reassigned to Oklahoma City. The project will be turned over to Lt. Col. Sinclair (Sarah Douglas) who has just arrived. Reynolds tells Curt the move will be in two weeks. However, Curt doesn’t want to leave and he and Julie take off on his motorcycle.
Unfortunately, they have an accident where Julie dies as she’s thrown from the bike and hits a utility pole on the side of the road. Having stolen his father’s security card, Curt sneaks back on the base and uses the 2-4-5 Trioxin gas on her. Julie comes back alive but is confused and disoriented. And she’s hungry. An Army soldier is killed by the zombie in the cannister as Curt and Julie flee to a convenience store where things go worse.
Curt and Julie are now running from both government officials and a band of bad Latinos led by Santos Morales (Mike Moroff) only finding temporary help and sanctuary from a homeless man “Riverman” (Basil Wallace). Julie also discovers that she can temporarily ease her cravings for human flesh and brains by self-mutilation.
While I’m admit it’s not the best of the formula, at least Yuzna adds some fun to the story despite its grim overtones. The movie taps into the culture of the time where youth really didn’t have the optimism they might have had 10 years earlier. The foolishness of Curt to reanimate Julie without fully understand the consequences goes all the way back to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
At the same time, Clarke gives a performance that is worthy of the context of the movie. Sometimes love means letting go as Julie becomes upset that she has been brought back with the murderous intentions she has. This proves that while a lot of youth of the time might have hung out drinking beer, smoking dope and riding motorcycles, they didn’t have violent behavior.
It’s more sadistic how Reynolds, Sinclair and the rest of the team feel they can mutilate people’s bodies all in the name of national security. Not to give too much away, but Yuzna and writer John Penney seem to be tapping into a mindset of the era (that is still prevalent today) that non-white people are more expendable. “Riverman” is a black man who becomes infected and re-animated. Dana Lee plays a store owner who becomes a victim. He’s of southeast Asian ancestry. Even the Army soldier who tries to stop Curt and Julia is black. On the other hand, all the scientist and top Army officials are white and mostly men.
When “Riverman” is outfitted with the metal exo-skeleton Sinclair had proposed, you don’t have to be a genius to note the similarities with the treatment of black people, especially men, throughout U.S. history. Another scientist has no empathy for the way those infected with the Trioxin gas will be treated. A scene of Julie, nude, in a cage with muzzle speaks volumes on the treatment of women as well.
Some of the criticism has been how different the zombies look from the previous movies, but they’ve spent years stuck in a cannister, they’re not going to have a model physique. Reportedly, Clarence Epperson, who plays the corpse being experimented on at the beginning, was a real homeless person the production found who could be pass as a zombie. This is his only acting credit.
For a cheap exploitation movie, there is a lot of social commentary. Unfortunately, audiences were divided and are still. Entertainment Weekly praised the movie when it was released but other critics weren’t as generous comparing it to the previous movies. Audiences are mixed on the tonal shift even though I think it works better than the second one. You can only poke fun of something so much before it gets tiresome.
It’s nowhere near as bad as those bad ROTLD made-for-TV sequels that were released on SyFy (when it was the Sci-Fi Channel) back in 2005.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 